Chet Atkins Chet Atkins - Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop

Photo courtesy of Chet Atkinswhich was the homemadeentertainment inthe east Tennessee ‘holler’where Chet grew up.Most everyone played orsang, and Chet naturallyjoined in. “When you’rea kid,” he told Nash,“you want to be like youridols, and my idols weremy father and mybrother, so they inspiredme to play music.”Chet’s half-brother,Jim, was given a Washburnguitar shortly afterChet’s birth, and it wasa source of infantile fascinationto the futureCGP (Certified GuitarPlayer, Chet’s self-bestoweddegree). “I idolizedJim when he sat and played,” Chet wrote in his autobiography,Country Gentleman (with Bill Neely, BallantineBooks, New York, 1974). “When he wasn’t playing it, I touchedit a lot, rubbed my fingers lightly over the top, savoring thesilky varnish, and picking at the strings ever so lightly. Thesteel strings felt cold and magical to my small fingers.”Chet’s fixation on the guitar was excited further by a childhoodvisit to the big city of Knoxville, twenty miles to thesouth. “There I saw a blind man playing a guitar on the street,”he recalled in his autobiography. “I can still see him, withthat old, beat-up guitar and a tin cup tied close to the pegs.I can even hear the coins drop into the cup. When we gothome, I told Mother, ‘I wish I was blind and had a guitar.’That’s how much I wanted to play.”Chet wasn’t yet five when he first began playing a handme-downukulele. His interest in guitar was piqued anytimea visitor appeared with one. “People had started to dreadbringing a guitar to the house,” Chet wrote in his autobiography.“In moments I was all over them...My nose was alwaysabout three inches from the bridge of every guitar Isaw being played for the next few years.” And his eager at-6